The Sojourn - Andrew Krivak [54]
Soon, night after night, there was no end to the litany, as though, now that I had known war and lived, there was nowhere I could go in peace where the war wouldn’t find me, and I would have gone mad were it not for the men who guarded me, who could read my face each morning and each night, and who changed my cell and my routine, and spoke to me occasionally when my food arrived, and still there was no escaping, and so I sat in my cell and prayed for death so as not to live in madness.
But on one of the days when, overnight, the wind had shifted with the seasons and the air was fresh, one of the old guards shook me awake in the morning and led me out through the yard and into a part of the prison that still held island prisoners, jailed for crimes heinous and mundane. There, they sat me next to an old man who was taking coffee in the sun, and I, too, was brought a small cup, and he began to speak of the weather and how he had been waiting for this day, when, with the wind, the entire island seemed to shift and change.
He was a Corsican and they called him “Banquo” because he had been imprisoned in the old jail for so long, he seemed a ghost himself, and no one knew what his crime had been (although he said to me, without my ever asking, that long, long ago he had killed a nobleman who had taken the virginity of his sister, and he never regretted once having thrust a knife into that man’s heart and then watching him die powerless and bewildered), and this meeting became our morning ritual, so that I began to wake on my own again in anticipation of it. When I could be put back to work again, it was he who crossed the yard and accompanied me to crack stones or dig latrines and then sat in the shade and tutored me in Italian, his rough tone giving way to the patient demeanor of a schoolmaster, or read to me from Emilio Salgari’s I Misteri della Jungla Nera, which one of the guards had given to him when he announced one day that it was his birthday.
IN NOVEMBER THE PRISON SWELLED WITH THOSE MEN OF OUR army who hadn’t been killed on the Piave when the Italians crushed Austria’s stand that autumn, men who were paraded into their cells, looking more like wraiths than prisoners of war, and who died without rising from their beds.
As my Italian improved, my conversations with Banquo began to become more far ranging, and he seemed to have an interest in and knowledge of life beyond those walls in a balance equal to his stoic acceptance of perpetual incarceration. On a cold day when jailers carried bodies out of the prison to a mass grave like men on a fire brigade, Banquo asked me in the yard, where we were drinking coffee and playing cards, how it felt to be alive when I saw so many of my comrades dead or dying, and I said that I had ceased to think of life or death because it seemed that I was destined to serve out the sentence of one for having delivered so well the sentence of the other, and that I saw the dead every night before I went to sleep as though they were still alive and standing before me.
He sat quietly for a long time and then said, “Como Io.”
To which I said, yes, like him, except that I didn’t kill just one and wasn’t expected to stop until I had murdered an army’s worth of men.
“One or many,” he said. “Still, they are dead and we are alive.” If there was a difference, he said, it was that I had marched with an army and that he had acted alone, but each believed that God was on his side, for no one raises a hand without convincing himself first that he is right.
From a far-off corner of the prison, there came the sound of singing, one of the guards, for the song was in Italian and spoke of a warrior who left his home